Are phones ruining our walks?
The case for keeping strolling and scrolling apart
A few months ago, I saw a guy drinking a beer in a sauna. Granted, this wasn’t one of those spruced-up bourgeois saunas where they give you a white terry cloth bathrobe upon check-in. This was a no-frills sauna with an ancient stone wall full of cracks and a bunch of middle-aged guys with tattoos and beards sitting on the wooden benches and basting in their own juices. One of them had a tallboy of Rolling Rock and he kept taking generous glugs from it, as waves of 200 degree heat swept across the upper benches. Now, I’m no stranger to an occasional shower stout during the summer, but given that saunas are renowned for promoting circulation and reducing inflammation, I wondered if crushing a 16 oz. beer in the sauna might cancel out the health benefits.
Most of us do this to ourselves in some way or another—pairing a restorative activity with a second activity that undermines the first activity’s therapeutic effects. For me, the problematic pairing that I haven’t been able to fully quit is scrolling on my phone when I’m out for a walk. It’s not that my phone is distracting me from my surroundings and my exposure to safety hazards. I always put my phone in my pocket whenever I’m approaching a street crossing, a water crossing, or a steep surface on which tripping could lead to a hospital visit. The issue is that when I return from a walk that included some solid phone time, I don’t feel restored. It’s similar to when you’ve woken up after five hours of sleep, when you know what it’s like to start your day after seven or eight hours in Dreamland. It’s the sensation of being unsated; vaguely ragged and unhappy.
And this past fall, after a few lapses, I began wondering: Are phones ruining our walks?
